HEROIC MYTHS AND TETRAETHYLLEAD
Bill Kovarik

Early Greek historians approached their work with two very distinct motivations, Around 430 BC, Herodotus, the “father” of history, wrote to “honor the heroes” of the Trojan Wars. Thucydides wrote the History of the Peloponnesian War thirty years later. He avoided romantic approaches because he was interested in analyzing the past in order to learn from it.

It’s useful to recall these two motivations, which are both common among historians through the ages, as we examine one of the most contentious areas in modern history -- the development of tetraethyllead (TEL) as a gasoline additive.

Between the 1920s and the 1970s, many historians saw the development of TEL as exemplary, high quality scientific research and portrayed it in a strongly romantic and heroic style. But in the 1990s, new documents have shed a harsher light on TEL research. Today, many historians believe that the natural impulse towards heroic myth got in the way of lessons that should have been learned.

An example of the heroic approach is found in a paper by Thomas Hughes, who called TEL development "a beautiful [example of] deliberately planned research." G.M. engineers Kettering and Midgley "tried out all elements possible in a so-called Edisonian style,"Hughes said. Other historians saw leaded gasoline as the final step in a progression of discovery, a "success story" with only one possible outcome. The public health controversy was dismissed as a wildly lurid and sensational sideshow of no importance.

In recent years, historians have asked new questions. For instance:
• Was GM management unaware of the risks of manufacturing and using TEL, as they claimed?
• How accurate is the portrayal of the public dimension of the 1920s environmental controversy?
• Was TEL the product of a systematic, scientific search through all possible alternatives? Were there other choices?
• How accurate was the public health research used by GM to support TEL during the 1930s – 1960s?
• How did TEL originally fit into GM’s long range plans to continue in business even if oil supplies ran out?

Until recently, historians lacked data on which to raise these questions, much less reach any conclusions. Most government documents were missing or destroyed. GM’s publicly available archives were three steps removed from historical validity. They were tertiary – that is, they mostly consisted of memos about memos. Unlike most other major inventions, none of the original lab notebooks, draft papers or internal reports were available until 1992.

That year, 40 boxes of disorganized files from Midgley’s Dayton, Ohio office were given to Kettering University (formerly General Motors Institute). These files, though incomplete, have enough of the early drafts and confidential memos to give an outline of the research program for the first time.

The Midgley documents demonstrate that: GM managers were aware of the health risks in the early 1920s; that they hurried production recklessly; that GM research reports were censored when they pointed the way to less toxic alternatives; that GM and Ethyl officials claimed in scientific meetings and government hearings that no alternatives existed; that TEL was profitable but a difficult technical choice among many alternatives; that its use was supported by deceptive public health research in the 1930s-1960s; and that Kettering and Midgley’s original special motivation for TEL was to boost engine compression ratios and ease the switch to non-petroleum fuels when oil ran out.

New research also showed that the public health controversy of the 1920s was based on legitimate concerns. Ironically, these concerns were entirely forgotten by the 1980s, and nearly identical arguments were replayed in public, scientific and governmental arenas. The TEL controversy is a good example of Santayana’s famous aphorism: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

These new interpretations of the history of TEL, which were rather at odds with the mythological histories, have now stood up to academic challenges and they are beginning to emerge in popular literature and in textbooks.

The process of research, discovery, weighing facts and then submitting conclusions for debate is essential in history, science, and other areas of serious scholarship. Researchers try to approach their material without preconceptions, follow the facts and submit their conclusions to other scholars for refutation or validation. In this process, myths will be uprooted and heroic reputations will betarnished. Not everyone will approve. There may be historians who decry “revisionism,” implying that history is being altered from some hypothetical original truthfulness.

At times, revisionism may seem reprehensible. For example, few people do not cringe to hear claims that the Holocaust of World War II did not occur. Yet such claims have fallen because they ignored facts, not because they attempted to revise a history which we must leave cemented in place. On the contrary, it is far better for the facts to be challenged from time to time in order to retrace our steps and be as certain of their accuracy as may be possible.

History, then, is not a static collection of well known facts anymore than science is an unchanging description of the physical world. History represents views of the past that may change, grow and coalesce around facts that may only become available decades after events in question. New facts may diminish the luster of our heroic narratives, and thismay make an historian unpopular. So it goes.

As Thucydides said, the job of an historian is not to win the applause of the moment, but to write history “as a possession for all time.”